Event Calendar & RSVP

4:00 PM to 5:15 PM

The central issue in this year's presidential election was already the economic crisis before Republican candidate Mitt Romney selected Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate. Ryan famously scuffled with Catholic bishops and theologians last spring when he claimed that his budget to fix the crisis was consistent with Catholic social teaching. One source for that teaching is scripture, so it is timely to ask what guidance the gospels offer for economic questions. Are the gospels appropriate resources in the contemporary global capitalist system, given that they were written in an entirely different economic context? How can scripture help us to act ethically?

Catherine Murphy is Associate Professor of New Testament at Santa Clara University, where she teaches courses on the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the historical Jesus, gender and postcolonial criticism. She earned her doctorate in New Testament and early Christianity from the University of Notre Dame, where she worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls publication team. She has written three books: Wealth in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Qumran Community (Brill, 2002), John the Baptist: Prophet of Purity for a New Age (Liturgical Press, 2003), and The Historical Jesus for Dummies (Wiley, 2008). She is currently working on two projects, a new edition of a Dead Sea Scroll and a study of early Christian food distribution in light of grain allocations to the citizens of Rome.